What the best teachers do...

On Friday, March 21, 2014, I was privileged to attend a lecture by Dr. Ken Bain on the topic of teaching and learning.  While his presentation was geared toward higher education, as is his book What the Best College Teachers Do, there was a lot that k-12 schools could take away from his talk.  I came away with several pages of notes, which I will not reproduce here. (You’re welcome!)  I will say that I was glad I had started reading his book before I attended the lecture, as it helped cement some of the concepts and also helped me to relate to the examples he used and the main points he made.  Let me see if I can boil it down to its essence.  

Dr. Bain divides learning approaches into three types, saying that people have a dominant learning approach, though they may use different approaches based on a variety of factors.  The one we want students to adopt most frequently is deep learning—this is learning that causes a person to look for meaning and the evidence for that meaning.  Deep learners are motivated by curiosity. Most often, however, schools have trained students to be either surface learners or strategic learners.  Surface learners remember facts for the test.  They never get past basic factual information to any kind of analysis or reflection.  They are motivated by fear.   Strategic learners are motivated by grades or recognition.  They learn procedurally (not conceptually) and they do not want to take risks—it might mean they don’t get the good grade, or that they are not perceived as smart if they mess up. 

In order to move students to deep learning, we need to ask better questions.  By framing the questions we can motivate students to want to know.  The question has to be interesting or intriguing to the students, so it has to somehow relate to them, or have some kind of resonance with them.  Now, this is not new, and I am sure you have heard it before, but besides asking good questions in order to motivate students to learn, Dr. Bain also asserts that the best teachers create a specific type of environment for learning.   His book discusses fifteen elements of the critical learning environment.  During the lecture, he discussed two. 

First—We have to put the learner in a situation where their existing mental model does not work.  In other words, provide them with an intellectual challenge or a failure of expectations—what they expect to happen does not happen.

Second—and this is the more difficult one for teachers—the students have to care that their existing model does not work enough to grapple with the evidence/learning in the course.  

Some of the hurdles we have to get over are the paradigms that students bring with them into a course, such as “I hate ABC,” or “I’m just not good at XYZ.”  Teachers also have to backtrack a little in their question framing.  Many teachers are subject matter experts, so the questions they want to ask are ripe and big, and often times intimidating or uninteresting to students.  Back up and remember what it was like when you were first learning about something.  What kinds of questions do students have about your subject?  Why should it matter to them?  Engage them with a puzzle to work out that will cause them to learn the information in your course.  

Now, I am well aware that we have standards and objectives to cover, and it is really difficult to always figure out how to frame the material students will be tested over, and they will be tested, in the form of a big, intriguing question.  However, why not start out by framing the objectives for the week or the unit into a series of questions or a big question that will engage students?  Getting students interested is more than half the battle, so if we can come up with ways to make subjects interest them and get them moving under intrinsic motivation, we may be able to encourage the deep learning and critical thinking we all want to see.

 

I am currently working on modules for an information literacy online course that I can hopefully embed into different subjects with teachers.  One of the things this presentation has made me do is rethink my modules a little.  I am trying to come up with the question(s) to get students interested in information literacy.  

Here are my first draft questions:

How does misinformation spread?

How do we know if the information we find is valuable?

How are search engines like tools in a tool box?

Does it really matter where you get information? Why or why not?

How will I know if someone plagiarizes my work?

These are a work in progress, so if you have suggestions, I would love to see them in the comments.